Twenty years of A Radical Cut

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Today is the twentieth anniversary – to the day – of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality. The very first post here was on August 8, 2005. The title came from a Slavoj Žižek quote (this was a long time ago, I would never quote Žižek now.) You can find the quote in this Twenty-eight quotations on failure post, if you scroll down to the middle, which was the first of a series of posts collecting quotes around a theme including: pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and of course failure. I've told this story before, but the main reason I started A Radical Cut was because I had written a book called Families Are Formed Through Copulation and was having great difficulty getting it published. Every publisher I sent it to said no, and more than a few genuinely seemed to hate it. So I was wondering if there was some way I could just write and have at least a few people read what I was writing, not have to wait so long (and receive so many rejection letters) before someone got to see it. Families Are Formed Through Copulation did eventually get published in 2007 by Pedlar Press (though it's now out of print.) And starting in 2014 my work began to have a little bit more of a positive readership and therefore it became a bit easier for me to get my books out there. Now I feel like I'm having almost the opposite problem, in that it seems to me I'm writing too many books too quickly (which is probably a problem many writers would like to have, assuming the books are any good.) (It now occurs to me that perhaps I would have written more books if, back when I was starting out, I'd had an easier time getting them published.) Earlier this year I started a Patreon and I suppose, at the time, I was planning to slowly phase out A Radical Cut and eventually just do the Patreon. But so far I haven't had the heart to make even small steps in that direction. Doing something for twenty years really makes it feel like it's a part of you. So we'll have to see what happens. Not quite sure how to end this, so perhaps I'll simply repeat myself (at least if you've read previous posts) by saying, if you don't already know, my last book got some really nice reviews. I wonder if I'll manage to do this thing for another twenty years.



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